The state's uninsured rate has been cut nearly in half after the launch of a statewide health care exchange.

Officials from Access Health CT, the state's health care exchange, announced that new research shows Connecticut's uninsured rate has fallen to 4 percent from 7.9 percent in 2012.

"The big news is that we have one of the lowest uninsured rate in the country, said Access Health CEO Kevin Counihan. "That's outstanding."

Access Health is one of a handful of state-run exchanges created as part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal health reform legislation also known as Obamacare.

The state numbers were released the same day as a Gallup poll that also showed a steep drop in uninsured rates here, but also a higher percentage of uninsured overall.

The Gallup poll aimed to show which states had the steepest drops in uninsured rates between 2013 and 2014. Connecticut had the 10th steepest decline in uninsured, according to that poll.

However, the Gallup numbers showed that 7.4 percent of state residents were uninsured in 2014. Still, that represents a steep decline from Gallup's 2013 numbers, which showed 12.3 percent of state residents were without insurance.

More Information

Gallup's numbers were based on two telephone surveys: one of 178,068 American adults during 2013 and another of 88,678 people during 2014.

Access Health based its 2014 numbers largely on its survey of 2,564 of its own members. From that survey, it was determined that roughly half of the 256,666 residents who signed up for insurance through the exchange were previously uninsured. Those responses were used to calculate the new uninsured number.

Counihan said he is more inclined to believe the Access Health numbers than the Gallup numbers, as the company "oversampled" in its survey.

But, either way, he said, the bottom line is that there are significantly fewer uninsured people in the state than just a few years ago.

At least one health advocate cheered the state's numbers.

"I think this is incredible and encouraging," said Elizabeth Krause, vice president of policy and communications for the CT Health Foundation. The foundation works to give low-income residents and people of color better access to care.

She said, considering that the exchange is still new, it's heartening that it seems to have made a difference in a short time.

"We're only one year into this new normal," she said. "This is fairly dramatic and it's great progress."

Other states either required residents to shop for insurance through the embattled federal website, HealthCare.gov, or provided an exchange that was part state-run, part federally run.

Though generally regarded as one of the more successful state exchanges, all has not gone smoothly for Access Health. In July, a computer glitch caused more than 5,000 members to be accidentally dropped from their insurance. Only about a month earlier, security concerns were raised about the exchange after an Access Health call center employee mistakenly left a backpack containing clients' personal information at a Hartford deli.